At midday criers ride through the streets declaring that the gates of the city will be bolted at sundown. The boom, a chain as thick around as a man’s waist and hung with floats, meant to prevent boats from sailing up the Golden Horn and attacking from the north, is drawn across the harbor and fixed to the walls of Galata across the mouth of the Bosporus. Anna imagines Kalaphates hunched on the deck of a Genoese ship, frantically checking his traveling trunks as the city dwindles behind him. She imagines Himerius standing barefoot among the fishermen as the city’s admirals look them over. The cut of his hair, the leather-handled knife in his waistband—he tries so hard to give off an illusion of experience and daring, but really he is just a boy, tall and big-eyed, wearing his patched coat in the rain.
By mid-afternoon the embroideresses who are married and have children have abandoned their worktables. From out in the street come the clopping of hooves and the splashing of wheels and the cries of carters. Anna watches Maria squint over her silk hood. She hears the voice of the tall scribe: The ark has hit the rocks, child. And the tide is washing in.
Omeir
Everyone studies the weltering skies; everyone grows uneasy. Out loud the teamsters say that the sultan is patient and generous, that he recognizes what he has asked of them, that in his wisdom he understands that the bombard will arrive at the battlefield when it is most needed. But after so much exertion, Omeir senses an unspoken agitation running through the men. The weather lurches from storm to storm; whips crack; resentments simmer. Sometimes he can feel men staring with naked suspicion at his face, and he becomes used to rising from the fire and stepping into the shadows.
An uphill section of road can take all day, but the descents cause the most trouble. Brakes snap, axles bend, the cattle bawl in terror and misery; more than once a jointed section of pole splinters and drives an ox to its knees, and every few days another bullock is butchered. Omeir tells himself that what they’re doing—all this exertion, all these lives put to the task of moving the cannon—is right. A necessary campaign, the will of God. But at unpredictable moments homesickness buries him: a sharp, smoky scent, the nickering of someone’s horse in the night, and it’s there again—the dripping of the trees, the burble of the creek. Mother rendering beeswax over the hearth. Nida singing among the ferns. Arthritic, eight-toed Grandfather limping to the byre in his wooden shoes.
“But how will he ever find a wife?” Nida asked once. “With that face of his?”
“It’s not going to be his face that stops them,” Grandfather said, “it’ll be the odor of his toes,” and grabbed one of Omeir’s feet and brought it to his nose and took a big whiff, and everyone laughed, and Grandfather dragged the boy into a great embrace.
* * *
Eighteen days into their journey, several of the iron bands holding the monstrous cannon to the cart give way, and it rolls off. Everyone groans. The twenty-ton gun gleams in the clay like an instrument discarded by the gods.
As though on cue, it begins to rain. All afternoon they work to winch the cannon back onto the cart, and haul the cart back onto the road, and that night holy scholars move among the cookfires trying to raise morale. The people in the city, they say, cannot even raise horses properly and have to buy ours. They lie on plush couches all day; they train their miniature dogs to run about and lick each other’s genitals. The siege will begin any day now, the scholars say, and the weapon that they pull will secure victory, click the wheels of fate in their favor. Because of their efforts, taking the city will be easier than peeling an egg. Easier than lifting a single hair from a cup of milk.
Smoke rises into the sky. As the men settle into sleep, Omeir feels a trickle of apprehension. He finds Moonlight just outside the firelight, trailing his halter rope.
“What is it?”
Moonlight leads him to where his brother stands beneath a tree, alone, favoring a hind leg.
* * *
Though the sultan has willed it and God has ordained it, to move something so heavy so far is, in the end, on the farthest threshold of what is possible. In the last miles, for every step forward, the train of oxen seems also to take a step downward through the earth, as though it travels not a road toward the Queen of Cities but a declivity into the underworld.
Despite Omeir’s care, by the end of the journey Tree shows no interest in putting weight on his left hind leg, and Moonlight can hardly raise his head, the twins pulling, it seems, just to please Omeir, as though the only thing left that matters to them is to meet this one demand, no matter how incomprehensible, because the boy has wished it so.